Beckett's prison protege: the inmate who became a top interpreter of writer's work

Rick Cluchey, who died on Monday, saw the essence of prison life in Waiting for Godot. The experience provided him with a new calling, inspiring a career in the theatre as he forged strong bonds with the playwright himself

The path from crime to rehabilitation is rarely as inspired as it was for Rick Cluchey, who found his calling as an actor and theater director after hearing Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot through the bars of his San Quentin prison cell.

In 1957, Cluchey, who died aged 82 on Monday in Culver City, California, was in the third year of a life sentence without parole for carjacking and armed robbery of a Los Angeles hotel courier when visiting actors performed the experimental masterpiece for inmates.

The inmate was captivated by what he heard broadcast over the prison speakers. He later explained that the Irish playwright’s dead-end conversation between Vladimir and Estragon and, in particular, the character of Lucky, Pozzo’s luckless slave led with a rope around his neck, had captured the essence of prison life.

“It indicated who was holding the rope,” Cluchey later said. “The warden.”

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Cluchey, who was denied a seat at the performance because he was considered an escape risk, found a new calling in the experience of Beckett’s work. He’d tried boxing, tried becoming a dental hygienist, but it was in Beckett that Cluchey – pronounced “clu-she” – found a path to rehabilitation that would transform his life.

“The thing that everyone in San Quentin understood about Beckett, while the rest of the world had trouble catching up, was what it meant to be in the face of it,” he later told the Los Angeles Times.

For the next nine years, until his sentence was commuted in 1966, he ran the newly formed San Quentin Drama Workshop, drawing largely on Beckett’s work.

On the outside, Cluchey excelled: he started the Barbwire Theater company with a troupe of ex-cons and became a leading interpreter of Beckett’s work. The men met after Cluchey became an assistant director to Beckett for a performance of Godot in Berlin. Beckett directed Cluchey in Krapp’s Last Tape and Endgame.

“He was able to inhabit a Beckett character in ways people who have been through acting school can only dream to attain,” said Purdue University professor and Beckett authority Lance Duerfahrd.

“In prison, Cluchey received an education on what it was to be on Beckett’s stage. It allowed him to love Beckett’s work. That, in turn, made him into a man Beckett himself could love.”

The two men formed an intense friendship. “Beckett was fascinated with Rick,” said Duerfahrd. “He had a longstanding empathy for prisoners, and he came to Rick with deep empathy as someone who could not choose his life, someone who had a lived connection to his work.”

Duerfahrd, author of The Work of Poverty: Samuel Beckett’s Vagabonds and the Theater of Crisis, believes prison’s intense, hushed, rule-bound environment is a precise echo of the qualities of Beckett’s dialogue and stage direction.

In Stuttgart, Cluchey spent 10 weeks with Beckett. He asked the author, who had told him he liked the spoken voice simply articulated, what Godot meant. “If I knew, I would have said,” Beckett replied.

“I found him to be saintly,” Cluchey later said. “He was very kind to us, despite his reputation of being a severe, nihilistic, godless man. I didn’t find that to be the case at all.”

Cluchey went on to write his own plays, including The Cage, which might be considered a transposition of Godot from within prison, the warden filling in as the nonexistent character of the title. That play, along with a letter from his sentencing judge, convinced then governor Pat Brown to commute Cluchey’s sentence to allow parole. Soon after his release from San Quentin, he took a production of his play using ex-convicts for actors across the US.

In 1987, his life was adapted for a film, Weeds, starring Nick Nolte. Cluchey turned his back on the experience. “It broke with his character in too many ways and I think Rick was hurt by the sensationalism that depicted him in an exaggerated fashion,” says Duerfahrd.

But the experience did not cool Cluchey to his calling. Duerfahrd, who is making a documentary about Cluchey, believes Beckett’s work offered the inmate-turned-actor a way to “sublimate his criminality”.

“He continued to break rules by inhabiting them differently,” Duerfahrd noted. “He said Beckett gave him a platform on which to express himself. Beckett’s characters annul themselves. They’re repressed, unexpressive, under-vocal, pinched, shackled. The more one describes Beckett’s work, the more it sounds like a synopsis of prison.”

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In recent years, even as his health succumbed to emphysema, Cluchey remained engaged in theatre. Last month, he was still giving readings of Beckett’s work, following the playwright’s personal instruction “to make it your own in terms of incarceration”.

While prison may have little to offer in terms of conventional theatrical transformation, Cluchey found an interesting confluence of one institutional experience – incarceration – and another – theater. “He showed us a reason for the convergence of the 20th century’s most experimental dramatist and the most barbaric institution of modern times – things that do not normally go hand-in-hand.”

Beckett’s interest in incarceration is well-known; he lived across from La Santé prison in Paris and sometimes communicated with inmates using a mirror and semaphore.